In recent years, portable communication terminals such as portable telephone devices have a browsing function for viewing the Internet, a digital camera function, an electronic mail transmitting and receiving function, a music replay function, and the like, as well as a menu for selecting items for the functions.
In a conventional portable communication terminal, however, contents of a menu are complicated, because there are various kinds of functions mounted in the terminal. In some portable telephone devices, a “simple mode” is employed. In the “simple mode”, the functions mounted in the device can be shuffled, so as to form a menu that is subjectively easy to see and easy to use.
In a case where a user of a portable telephone device uses only basic function, too many functions only cause confusion at the time of use, and a most of “easy-to-use” menus provided by the manufacturer of the portable telephone device is left unused.
To display this type of menu, there has been proposed a method of automatically customizing a menu so that users need to perform only a small number of operations to choose menu items and data to be used frequently (see Patent Document 1, for example). By this method, the frequency of use of each menu item is measured immediately below the menu item hierarchical level, and the menu items having high frequency of use are put at higher hierarchical levels.
There has also been proposed a method by which parameters of menu elements are locked or unlocked and the state thereof is displayed or not displayed on the menu option screen (see Patent Document 2, for example). By this method, an automatic mode or a manual mode can be mounted, and, when the automatic mode is selected, the parameters with lower (higher) frequency of use are automatically locked (unlocked).    Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-287702    Patent Document 2: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. H10-161832